UNUSUAL SUSPECTS: Character Actors in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly.

Given its script, camera work, superb set-up shots and direction, Kiss Me Deadly is, in the end, an actor’s film, at least when it comes to bit and character parts. At the same time, perhaps due to the extremity of its social critique, appearing in Aldrich’s 1955 movie seemed, for some, more like a one way ticket to obscurity. Some of those appearing in the film had promising careers prior to Kiss Me Deadly, only to be type-casted in its wake. Then there were those who remained bit actors before and after making the film.  Others would go on to achieve a degree of success, though even these actors would face a career of type-casting. Having said, the importance of characters actors, not to mention their professionalism, is undeniable. Appearing in the background, they are able to embellish the plot, as well as create atmosphere. Moreover, in Aldrich’s day, such actors could appear in three or four movies per year, always in the background, more often than not portraying a particular type. Moreover, those who appeared in Kiss Me Deadly would be utilized by Aldrich in subsequent films.  

Tough, cynical, cocky, stupid, sadistic, with a commanding screen presence, Ralph Meeker takes on the role of Mike Hammer with his particular fractured authority. Not  a character actor as such, but someone who would be type-casted for much of his post Kiss Me Deadly career. He was particularly well-suited to play Hammer, a role which required an aggressive yet  straight face, capable of displacing irony from the character onto the narrative itself. However, few remember that Meeker, before Kiss Me Deadly, had a promising career as a promising stage actor, replacing Marlon Brando in the Broadway version of Streetcar Named Desire after the latter decided to head for Hollywood. When cast by Aldrich to play Hammer, Meeker had been  starring in the stage version of William Inge’s Picnic,  a screen role associated with William Holden, and a role for which Meeker had garnered the New York Critic’s Award (as one is told in the trailer for Kiss Me Deadly). When Meeker’s went to Hollywood to make Kiss Me Deadly, it would be none other than Paul Newman who would replace him. Yet Meeker’s Hollywood career would pale compared to Brando’s, Newman’s or Holden’s. In fact, Meeker as Stanley Kowalski is a far cry from Meeker as Mike Hammer, even though both roles exude a primitivism so extreme that audiences sometimes aren’t sure where authenticity ends and humour begins. At the same time, whatever Meeker’s limitations, one wonders if Brando would have been able to handle both parts- Kowalski and Hammer- with equal aplomb. In all probability, Meeker was more versatile than his career suggests. Even before appearing in the stage version of Picnic, he had acquired a screen reputation, having starred in Glory Alley (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and Big House USA (1955). While Newman, Holden, Brando, all went on to become highly paid stars, Meeker would remain the odd man out, never quite getting the big-time roles achieved by the other three actors. 

So why Meeker?  Part of the reason for casting him must surely have been financial. Here was a fresh face and, though not a big name, a capable actor, well-versed enough to have no qualms about subsuming himself in the role.  As Aldrich said, “I didn’t need a real star to get the money for the film. The name Mickey Spillane...was enough.” A rare case of the author of the novel selling the movie. Despite his performance, Meeker’s future career would consist of playing the same cynical, hard-edged, tough-talking role time and time again, type-casted as it were in such Hollywood films as Run of the Arrow (1957), Paths of Glory (1957), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967). 

In fact, Meeker could even be thought of as the screen equivalent to Aldrich: underrated, technically proficient, and professional. With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing Hammer, for few would have been capable of being so dark, so sardonic, and so willing to become as sleazy. Disappearing into the role as someone with no allegiance or class loyalty, and a face that’s hard yet baby-like, unformed because it is impervious. Regardless of the effect on his career, Meeker was able, in Kiss Me Deadly, to take  the noir anti-hero to new heights. 

Cloris Leachman, as Christina, has an short but significant presence in Kiss Me Deadly. Though she dies some ten minutes into the film, she remains a dominant, if ghostly, influence on the narrative. It’s not just her death that is crucial to the film, but her feminist perspective, not to mention the ease with which she can read Hammer. Of the three main women in the film, Leachman is probably the most capable actress. Plain looking- reminding one of Stanwyck- with short blond hair, her barbed remarks cut Hammer to the core. At the same time, unlike Lily’s neurotic whine or Velda self-conscious animal sexuality, if not perversity, Christina need only rely on her wit. Hammer doesn’t like her; after all, she’s an intelligent woman, and therefore of interest to him. Having flagged down his car, Christina easily talk circles around the laconic and iconic Hammer, who can’t quite fathom her. But at least he stopped to pick her up. After all, two other cars had previously passed her by. And there is something about her, other than her looks, that attracts him. Perhaps it’s just that she represents something human, or maybe she represents the last vestige of Hammer’s humanity, some dim memory about what it is to be human. Or maybe he finds her intriguing because he can’t dominate her. That is, if Hammer can be said to have even the slightest analytical ability, whether regarding his own motives or those of others. Be that as it may, Christina, without being present-something akin to Jeanne Crane in Horner’s 1953 film Vicky- becomes the narrative’s provocateur, putting Hammer on the trail of the “great Whatsit.”  Without Christina, and Leachman playing her with such aplomb, the narrative would have stalled in the opening few minutes, and Hammer would be left to his clichés, pursuing divorce cases, entrapping women, while his secretary, Velda, entraps their husbands. 

One wouldn’t know from her performance that Kiss Me Deadly was Leachman’s first film appearance. Previously this former Miss Chicago had only appeared on TV.  But Aldrich, already with a reputation as an excellent director of actors, gets an assured performance from her. Consequently, Leachman strikes the right posture and attitude, gleaning information about Hammer, criticising him without compromising herself or alienating the detective. Her performance also has a great to do with A.I. Bezzerides’s script. What more could a novice film actor want than to  appear in the opening scene, make a strong impression, then make an early exit from the film. Yet Leachman would remain a relatively obscure, though versatile, actress right up to her Oscar winning performance in The Last Picture Show (1971), before going to appear in such films as Young Frankenstein (1974),  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dillinger (1973),  Daisy Miller (1974), Crazy Mama (1975) and High Anxiety (1977). However, in Kiss Me Deadly, Christina represents a different type of woman, a proto-feminist unwilling to toe the 1950s line regarding women and power. Intelligent, sensitive but scared, she refuses to insulate herself by constructing a near-Thatcherite personality, as does Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious (1952), Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns (1957) and Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1953). Reason enough, perhaps, for her move from lunatic asylum to Hammer’s car to the lair of her torturer. 

While the careers of Meeker and Leachman were, to differing degrees, circumscribed by their roles, Kiss Me Deadly is a movie filled with lesser known character actors. Though, for such actors, being circumscribed by one’s role goes with the territory. Still, some would fall into the black hole that comprises the finite universe of studio movie-making.  Others would reappear in future Aldrich films. Perhaps Aldrich liked to maintain a pool of actors, if for no other reason than they knew how he worked, which, in turn, made filming easier and quicker. Unlike Meeker and Leachman, many of these actors, though they might have wished otherwise, were destined for a litany of bit parts. Taking that into consideration, Kiss Me Deadly would prove less a graveyard than some kind of cinematic limbo. 

Though that doesn’t quite describe the career of Albert Dekker who plays the menacing Dr Soberin. Quoting the classics and connected to art world, Soberin’s agenda is to profit from unbridled technology. Born in Brooklyn, 1904, Dekker appeared in such films as Dr Cyclops (1940), The Killers (1946), Destination Murder (1950), The Pretender (1947) and Suspense (1946). Then came his political career, serving  as a Los Angeles Democratic assemblyman from 1945-46. After Kiss Me Deadly, his career stalled, appearing in just six films over the next fifteen years. In the 1960s he returned to the stage, and appeared in a final film, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Soon afterward he died in mysterious circumstances. Though the official cause of death was accidental suffocation, it appeared to be a case of robbery (money and electronic equipment were missing), but with sadomasochistic overtones. When his body was discovered, the coroner is reported to have said, "This one had everything but a vampire bite." 

Other actors in Kiss Me Deadly were fortunate enough to escape such infamy.  Amongst the film’s most capable characters was Paul Stewart as the gangster, Evello. Stewart had once been part of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, having made  his screen debut in Citizen Kane (1941), as Kane’s valet. He went on to mostly portray gangsters, fight promoters and cops in scores of films, both on TV and on the screen, including  Johnny Eager (1942), Champion (1949), The Window (1949), Edge of Doom (1950), Deadline USA (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Loan Shark (1952),The Juggler (1953), The Joe Louis Story (1953), The Wild Party (1956), King Creole (1958), In Cold Blood (1967) and Day of the Locust (1975). With a memorable face, and tough working class demeanour, he’s one of those character actors for whom the term character seems to have been invented. Which is to say his life appears to have been written on his face.  

Another character actor in the film is Wesley Addy who plays the mysterious Pat, whose relationship to Hammer is nothing less than ambiguous. Is he Hammer’s friend or his nemesis? Is he a cop or federal agent? And is there some kind some homoerotic relationship between the two men? Other than Eddie the mechanic, Pat is the only man in the film that Mike seems to like. He’s even able to walk into Mike’s apartment without waiting for the door to be opened for him, whereupon he sees Mike and Velda kissing and says, “Don’t let me bother you.”  Perhaps he feels at home in their presence. Or maybe he’s a kind of voyeur, playing a role not unlike those viewing the film. And even though he’s filing a secret report on Hammer, Pat refuses to take part in the Feds questioning of Mike. Laudable, but there is something distinctly creepy about Pat. Of course, he admires Hammer, perhaps a little too much. Working for the state, this thinking man’s Mike Hammer appears to be ex-military, or a former athlete that has spent too much time in Hugh Hefner’s Penthouse. To his credit, Addy has no problem carrying off so ambiguous a role. After Kiss Me Deadly, Addy would go on to appear in numerous films, including six more films by Aldrich- The Big Knife (1955), The Garment Jungle (1957), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), 4 for Texas (1963), Hush..Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and The Grissom Gang (1971), as well as non-Aldrich films like Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), Seconds (1966), Network (1976) and The Europeans (1979). Through it all, Addy always appears to be in character, maintaining the coldness of a sci-fi alien, a judge or  state functionary. 

Perhaps it was her willingness to compulsively smooch Mike Hammer that put a damper on Maxine Cooper’s career. As someone else whose character is written on her face, Cooper’s role in Aldrich’s film touches on the perverse, so much so that she must be one of the few women in film- another example is Mercedes MacCambridge and, for that matter, Joan Crawford, in Johnny Guitar- whose sexuality is not something many would care to encounter. In fact, there is something incestuous about her relationship with Hammer. Though Cooper had a prolific career on TV, she only appeared in three other movies, two of them by Aldrich- as the bank teller in  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), as the nurse in Autumn Leaves (1956), and, swapping healer for a person needing healing, as a sick woman in Hal Bartlett’s airplane melodrama Zero Hour! (1957).  None of those roles come close to the raunchiness of Cooper’s presence as Velda. Which is a shame, because there is something genuinely disturbing about her as Velda, as if Aldrich and Bezzerides can’t decide whether she is a moron, a nymphomaniac, or a prophetess, who speaks about “the great whatsit” while supplying the brains to Hammer’s brawn. 

From the sublime to the ridiculous, Gaby Rodgers (Lily-Gabrielle) is yet another memorable character in Aldrich’s movie. Her performance as a young neurotic comes across as near-Brechtian in its alienation, giving one cause to wonder if she’s  a bad  actress or superbly capable of delivering her lines as instructed. Unfortunately, Kiss Me Deadly was a big kiss-off for  Rodgers who appeared in just one other movie, The Big Break (1953), two years before Aldrich’s film. After Kiss Me Deadly, she, like Cooper, turned to TV work. Literally radiating in the film, one assumes it was Rodgers’s ambiguity rather than her sexuality that cut her Hollywood career. 

Nor was Hollywood all that kind to Marian Carr, who played Friday, the nymphomaniac and sister to the gangster Evello. Though Carr’s career did last at least  another year. Prior to Kiss Me Deadly she had been in such films as Twin Husbands (1946), Follow That Blonde (1946), San Quentin (1946), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), Northern Patrol (1953),  Ring of Fear (1954), World for Ransom (1954), and Cell 2455 Death Row (1955). After Aldrich’s film, her output was limited to Nightmare (1956), The Harder They Fall (1956), Ghost Town (1956), Indestructible Man (1956) and When Gangland Strikes (1956). Clearly, offering sex so blatantly is as unforgivable as being, consciously or otherwise,  a bad actress. If it is true, and it is all about character-  “It’s not enough to have talent, you’ve got to have character,” says George C. Scott to Paul Newman in The Hustler- it’s debatable whether Carr was born with it or had it thrust upon her.

Keith McConnell, who plays the Athletic Club clerk, appears for a matter of minutes, slapped around before turning into a nearly unrecognizable corpse. He is the  man who guards the gate behind which lies Pandora’s box. Inept he might be, but, then, that’s his nature. The man’s character is one of weakness, once again there’s a homosexual undercurrent. Born in 1923, McConnell had a lengthy career, specializing, despite his Irish background, in playing British officers, gentlemen and gentry, as well as  policemen, butlers, bartenders and even Sherlock Holmes. His first film credit was in 1950, playing a British lieutenant in When Willie Comes Marching Home, followed by such forgettable  films as Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), A Life of Her Own (1950), Kim (1950), 5 Fingers (1952), Botany Bay (1953), The Caddy (1953), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), 4 for Texas (1963), Morituri (1965), Time After Time (1979), Wrong Is Right (1982) and Young Lady Chatterley II (1985). His face exudes submissiveness and fear. As an effeminate male, he comes right out of Spillane’s homophobic and nativist novel.

Being an L.A. film, albeit in the 1950s, necessitates a smattering of ethnic types. So naturally one finds characters actors from an assortment of communities. Like Nick the mechanic, who comes across as Hammer’s one true friend, bonding through their love of fast sports cars. Displacement it might be, technological pornography it most definitely is. Jive-talking Nick is particularly fond of saying “va va voom.” Once ensconced in Mike’s car, he says to his idol, “I want to see how this little bird flies,” and “let’s get his baby on the road.”  A speed merchant, he’s  on top of things,  as up to date as any member of the lumpen proletariat can possibly be. Nick is in fact Nick Dennis, born in Thessaly, Greece in 1904. His foreign-looking face  appeared in a number of  films, or at least  whenever a Greek, Turk or Mexican was needed. His first appearance was in 1947 in A Double Life. From there he went on to appear in Sirocco (1951), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Ten Tall Men (1951), East of Eden (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Top of the World (1955), Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957), Spartacus (1960), Too Late Blues (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), 4 for Texas (1963). Like Christina, Nick has an early death in Aldrich’s film. Mike mourning his passing with a worried look and a tumble in bed with Velda. But Nick is the only guy capable of making Mike’s engine hum.

Besides Nick and McConnell the Irishman-turned-English, there’s Juano Hernandez as Eddie Yeager. He is a boxing trainer whom Hammer consults in his gym, following a template upon which such roles would be based, including George Tobias in The Set Up, Paul Stewart in Champion, Everett Sloane in Somebody Up There Likes Me, Nicholas Colasanto in Fat City, Morgan Freeman in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, etc.. Hernandez is probably best remembered for his role in Ben Maddow’s adaptation of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), directed by Clarence Brown, in which, he appeared as the black man who is lynched. An ex-boxer, Hernandez, previous to his movie career, had worked in circuses, carnivals,  minstrel shows and vaudeville. Born in Puerto Rican, in 1901, he appeared in TV programs like Naked city, The Defenders and Johnny Staccato. The son of a seaman, Hernandez was self-educated, having spent his youth as a street singer in Brazil and landed his first acting role in a 1927 production of Show Boat. Prior to Intruder in the Dust, Hernandez appeared in Harlem is Heaven (1932), The Girl From Chicago (1932) and Lying Lips (1939),  Young Man With a Horn (1950), Stars in My Crown  (1950) and The Breaking Point (1950). After Kiss Me Deadly he would go on to appear in some twelve films, including St Louis Blues (1958), The Pawnbroker (1964), and The Reivers (1969), playing cops, judges, preachers, musicians, sharecroppers, and native Americans. In Aldrich’s film, Hernandez has what amounts to a cameo role, underused and only peripherally relevant to the plot.

Marginally less peripheral are the two thugs Hammer confronts in the swimming pool changing room at Evello’s luxurious home. The recognizable faces of the two Jacks- Jack Lambert and Jack Elam in the roles of Sugar and Charlie Max- are sleazy rather than ethnic. Slit-eyed and ugly, Jack Lambert looks like a nightclub bouncer or ex-football player who has recently fallen off the wagon. Born in 1920,  Lambert was in such illustrious films as The Killers (1946), Chicago Confidential (1957), Machine Gun Kelly (1958), Party Girl (1958), Force of Evil (1948), The Great Gatsby (1949), Day of the Outlaw (1959), and Aldrich’s Four for Texas,  Vera Cruz (1954) and Four for Texas (1963). His partner is another usual suspect when it comes to film noir, and, if anything, even more ubiquitous and menacing than Lambert. Specializing in playing gangsters and outlaws, Jack Elam was, in fact, a former accountant and hotel manager. With a leer, the result of blindness in one eye- making him the original “one-eyed Jack”- Elam appeared in such films as The Far Country (1954), Vera Cruz (1954), Kansas City Confidential (1952), Rancho Notorious (1952), Gunfight at OK Corral (1957), Baby Face Nelson (1957), Four for Texas (1963), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). As a character actor he occupied a position on the weird and wild side of John Ireland and Arthur Kennedy. One could say that Elam and Lambert illustrate the extent to which Hollywood relied on such people, their ilk giving various movies that evil leer and dangerous atmosphere. In fact, film noir as a genre would have been all the poorer for their absence, so adept were they, thanks to directors like Aldrich, at giving such films a creepy everyman look without needing an  over-abundance of dialogue or screen-time.

But, then, neither did Fortunio Bonanova need much screen time to memorable. One first glimpses him in the role of Carmen Trivago, in a Bunker Hill rooming house, the kind of place fellow-Italian John Fante writes about in Dreams From Bunker and Ask the Dust. According to Velda, Trivago is “an opera singer in search of an opera,”  so he stays in his room singing along with Caruso. That is, until Hammer arrives, wants information and, when Trivago hesitates, he, like the oaf he is, begins breaking his beloved records. Unlike Elam and Lambert, Trivago, at twice their weight, was no tough-guy. In fact, he began his  career as a baritone singer with the Paris Opera, going on to write a number of operettas, plays and novels, as well as appearing in several movies.  Like Paul Stewart, Bonanova was in Citizen Kane, playing the singing coach who, at great pains, instructed Kane’s second wife to reach those dulcet tones. That Aldrich would pick up on two actors from Welles’s movie says something about his astuteness regarding character actors and how they can alter the atmosphere of  a movie, as well as  his artistic relationship to Welles- both were working at RKO in 1941- whose film Touch of Evil, released two years earlier, might be thought of as a spiritual cousin to Aldrich’s movie. 

Another Italian making a brief but important, appearance in Kiss Me Deadly is Silvio Minciotti who plays the old man moving furniture on his back in the Bunker Hill rooming house. He is important if only because he has a spare moment to philosophize, while telling Hammer, who might be one of the few people who ever stopped to talk to the old man, where he, Hammer, can find Lily. More of a trooper  than Bonavova, Minciotti was called upon whenever a picture called for a rugged, old world Italian. Consequently, he appeared in such films as Full of Life (1957), The Wrong Man (1956), Serenade (1956), Marty (1955), Clash by Night (1952), Fourteen Hours (1951), Deported (1950), House of Strangers (1949), The Undercover Man (1949).  His presence in Kiss Me Deadly, and I mean his presence, rather than the lines he speaks, gives the film, up to that point, a semblance of gravitas.

If Hammer denotes masculinity-beyond the call of duty,  there are others who denote the opposite. If not effeminate, then at least weak men; in other words, those who can be pushed around by tough-guy crooks and private investigators. Consequently, we not only have Trivago and the Athletic Club clerk, but the morgue attendant, played by the familiar face of Percy Helton, who must surely have been one of the most prolific bit-actors in Hollywood. Of course, such parts would only be plentiful so long as tough-guys continued to flex their muscles. Helton began his career as far back as 1915, playing the waif in the silent film, The Fairy and the Waif.  His professional career would last until  the 1970s, appearing  in scores of films, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Head (1968), The Songs of Katie Elder (1969), Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), 4 For Texas (1963), Ride the High Country (1962), The Music Man (1962), Jailhouse Rock (1957), Shake Rattle and Roll (1956), White Christmas (1954), A Star is Born (1954), Thieves Highway (1949), The Set Up (1949), Criss Cross (1949), Call Northside 777 (1948) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). With an apparent fondness for the service sector, Helton’s speciality seemed to be funeral directors, store keepers, bank clerks, hotel clerks, news vendors, mailmen, judges, chauffeurs, station masters, train conductors, drunks, loafers, and any part that necessitated servitude, obsequiousness or marginality. 

But there were even those with more marginal roles, their primary function to reinforce Hammer’s perspective. For instance, Robert Sherman who crops up at the beginning of Kiss Me Deadly  as the leering gas station attendant. He would go on to appear in films like Aldrich’s The Big Knife, (1955), Picture Mommy Dead (1966), No Time for Sergeants (1958), Kiss Them for Me (1957), For Men Only (1952). As well as a gas station attendant, he find cinematic service as a soldier, cop, journalist and, in Aldrich’s The Big Knife, a bongo player. In Kiss Me Deadly we see him sizing-up Christina, and so informs the viewer he comes from the same mould as Hammer. On the other hand, he agrees to post Christina’s letter. With McCarthyites lurking in the background, and “the Great Whatsit” in everyone’s consciousness, this was a world where such attitudes were commonplace, and those emulating Hammer had the upper hand. Whether he would tempt a federal rap and peak inside that letter is another matter.

Some of the other character actors in Kiss Me Deadly who would appear in Aldrich’s later films include Marjorie Bennett, the manager of Silvio’s apartment. Bennett made her first film appearance in 1917, followed by scores of others in which she mainly played housekeepers and cooks, from Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) to Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Coogan’s Bluff (1968). Mort Marshall as Ray Diker, the science reporter on whom Velda compiles a file, whose bloody face one sees in close-up, would appear in Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang (1971) as well as Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955). Strother Martin as Harvey Wallace the truck driver who kills Kawolsky because of his connection to Christina, would appear in Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), as well as The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Butch Cassidy (1969). James McCallion as Horace, the building superintendent where Christina lived until “she moved out…in the middle of the night,” would also have a lengthy career in TV westerns and crime stories as well as appearing in Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Combo (1955) and Coogan’s Bluff.  Robert Cornthwaite, playing one of the FBI agents would be typecasted as doctors, professors and military types, while James Seay, the other FBI agents, would be given roles that required an authoritative voice. Both Seay and Cornthwaite can also be seen in Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Screenwriters came and went- though Aldrich would use Bezzerides three times in all- but bit actors tended, in order to maintain a particular look to his films, to be re-employed by Aldrich. It would be a mistake to say other directors did not make use of these unsung professionals who, if luck and ability would have it, could appear in several movies per year, but few seemed to deploy such actors to the degree Aldrich did, using them as a quasi-company that defined and enriched his work. Keeping the budget low and the atmosphere high, these actors put in performances that were memorable yet subsidiary, foregrounded for a moment but subservient to the main actors and narrative. Kiss Me Deadly, as much as any other Aldrich film, relies on  such character actors to the degree that one could say that the film is propelled by their performances. This even applies to the main roles- Meeker, Rodgers, Cooper, and Leachman- themselves little more than character actors writ large. In fact, their performances are a testimony to the power of the film as an idea and social critique, to the degree that even its stars would become, to one degree or another, type-casted, no matter how hard they might have wanted to resist that definition.  After all, in Hollywood, ”you’ve got to have character,” even in era of the great Whatsit.